Whilst we must seek to understand, we must never change Christianity to make it so light and trivial that it will appeal to the TikTok generation. We want to challenge the world—not become like it.
TikTok is a fascinating phenomenon. In the world of social media, we have YouTube for videos, Instagram for photos, Facebook for connection, Twitter for argument and now, the new kid on the bloc, Tik Tok, which adds all of these together and, if it were possible, simplifies them. Tik Tok is a Chinese owned social media platform with 750 million followers—100 million of them in the US, 10 million in the UK, and 2.5 million in Australia. In the past year the number of TikTok users in Australia more than doubled. Yours truly was one of them.
Like all media it can be used for good or ill. The printing press can be used to print Bibles or pornography; TV can be used to glorify nature, or violence; and TikTok can show the beauties of Australia or the ugliness of human behaviour. But there is another, deeper, and more sinister aspect of social media in general and TikTok especially.
Long before it was even dreamed of, Neil Postman warned of a time when we would be ‘amusing ourselves’ to death:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.
TikTok is brilliant.
Not at giving us information, balanced opinion, news, or serious thought. It is brilliant at entertaining and distracting us. Just as the genius of the TV series ‘24’ was to get you to switch on to the next episode immediately, so TikTok can quickly become an addictive drug. Time is a precious commodity given to us by the Lord. TikTok is a thief of time.
It also distorts.
We’ve had the Twitterisation of politics, now we have its TikTokisation. People give their opinion in sixty seconds. There is no nuance, no context, and no awareness of the complexities of human life and behaviour. In social media in general and TikTok in particular the world is simply divided into good and evil, black and white. The trouble is that if you are after ‘likes’ the more extreme, shocking, and exploitative videos and comments get the most likes.
TikTok is destructive.
It’s not just that TikTok is a narcissist’s dream—it goes beyond that. Jonathan Haidt, the American psychologist, was asked about the worst invention in the 21st century so far. His reply was immediate—‘the like button on Facebook’. He spoke of the psychological harm it was doing, especially to teenage minds. TikTok is destructive of our cognitive abilities and our capacity to reason and think. When everything is reduced to a sixty second soundbite, then polarisation and tribalism become much more evident.
